Amid SAT debate, University of California graduation rates hit record highs

As thousands of professors at in the University of California system say the students entering their classrooms are increasingly underprepared for university-level math, the university’s timely graduation rates just hit all-time highs. In the 2024-2025 school year, the university’s freshman four-year graduation rate reached 74% while the transfer two-year rate surpassed 66%, marking significant increases over the last decade.

The freshman four-year graduation rate is the percentage of undergraduate students who entered the university as freshmen and completed their bachelor’s degree within four years. The transfer two-year graduation rate is the percentage of transfer students who completed their bachelor’s degree within two years of arriving at a four-year university.

“These outcomes reflect years of hard work by our faculty, staff, and campus leaders alongside sustained investments in advising, academic support, financial aid, basic needs, and other student success initiatives across the system,” said Maria Anguiano, chair of the UC Board of Regents, at a meeting last week.

In 2018, UC leadership set goals to address a projected gap in college-educated workers as the baby boomer generation approached retirement age. With the aim of producing an addition 200,000 degrees beyond the 1 million already projected for 2030, the university set goals to improve its graduation rates. This included a 90% overall graduation rate for freshmen and transfers, a 76% four-year freshman graduation rate and a 70% two-year transfer graduation rate by 2030. The university also sought to close gaps in timely completion for Pell Grant recipients and first-generation students.

Equity gaps remain

Despite the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the UC system is on track to meet these goals in 2030. The overall graduation rate for non-transfer students — measured as the percentage of students who completed their degrees in six years — has bounced back after a slight dip in 2022 and 2023.

In the 2024-2025 school year, 86% of non-transfer students graduated within six years. Meanwhile, the overall graduation rate for transfer students — measured as the percentage of students who graduated within four years of joining the university — was 89% in 2024-2025, only a percentage point away from the 90% target for 2030. Still, graduation rates for first-generation students, Pell Grant recipients and students from underrepresented groups lag behind the overall rates.

For longstanding equity gaps to be closed, improvements among these student groups must outpace overall progress. So far, this has not been the case across the board.

For example, the freshman four-year graduation rate increased from 68% to 74% between 2018 and 2025, marking a 6 percentage point increase. For first-generation students, the freshman four-year graduation rate improved from 61% to 66% during the same time, meaning the gap with the overall rate has widened by 1 percentage point in this time. For Pell Grant recipients and students from underrepresented groups, the gap has narrowed — but only modestly.

Meanwhile, the UC system has made better progress in closing equity gaps for transfer students. Between 2018 and 2025, the two-year graduation rate for transfer students increased by 10 percentage points from 57% to 67%. For Pell Grant recipients in the transfer population, the improvement over seven years was 14 percentage points, jumping from 50% to 64%. First-generation students and those from underrepresented groups have also nearly caught up to the overall rate.

To boost graduation rates, UC campuses have invested in advising and student support services, reimagined their approach to academic recovery, broadened access to research and experiential learning opportunities and aimed to create a sense of belonging on campus, officials said. They have also redesigned introductory mathematics and chemistry courses since their attrition rates have historically been high.

The SAT debate

As the university system spotlights its improving graduation rates, for the last several weeks, faculty have drawn attention to a “widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels” in those introductory courses. They say the problem has become so severe that they have to reteach middle school math while delivering lessons in science, engineering, economics and other quantitative fields.

In a letter signed by more than 2,300 STEM faculty, they say they are already seeing “longer pathways through prerequisite material, reduced readiness for advanced coursework and growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor.” They fear these trends will lead to declining graduation rates, longer time to complete degrees and reduced completion of STEM majors.

For this growing “abilities gap,” they placed the blame squarely on the elimination of the SAT and ACT requirements from the UC’s admissions policies in 2020. They are calling for a reinstatement of standardized testing, a demand that has been at the center of a national debate and is currently being considered by UC leadership. While supporters say this is necessary for the UC to remain a leader in STEM fields, critics worry these tests are biased against low-income and minority students.

During a presentation on the new graduation rates data at the Board of Regents meeting last week, Regent Jose Hernandez drew attention to the contradictory nature of the data and what STEM professors were saying in public comment on the issue.

“I’m a little confused,” Hernandez said. “What I’m hearing from the audience, particularly the Berkeley professors, is that the sky is falling. I would expect the graduation rates to go down. Or are we expecting them to go down? The data is contradictory to what we’re hearing.”

Nearly 20% of the signatories to the letter are UC Berkeley professors. Another 25% are professors from UC San Diego, meaning nearly half the signatories belong to only two of the UC system’s 10 campuses. Counting signatures on a separate support letter written by non-STEM faculty, a total of about 3,300 professors are calling for a reinstatement of standardized testing. The system has more than 26,000 faculty employees.

Responding to Hernandez, UC Institutional Research and Academic Planning Vice President Pamela Brown said challenges exist for the students coming in, but the data illustrates that students can overcome them and succeed at the university. In a report, officials noted that pandemic-induced learning losses in math and longstanding equity gaps in pass rates in introductory STEM courses continue to be challenges for the system to contend with as it works to boost its student success indicators.

Brown added that the university system plans to analyze graduation rates specifically for STEM majors to see if those match the larger university trend of success.

Gabriel Rossman, a sociology professor at UCLA and a lead organizer on the non-STEM faculty letter in support of reinstatement of the SAT, said the reason for the apparent contradiction is clear: grade inflation.

Rossman said he believes the affect of removing standardized testing from the admissions process in 2020 has not yet hit graduation rates, given the time lag between students admission and graduation.

“I’m predicting that if we don’t bring back the SAT/ACT almost immediately, you’re going to see dropout rates,” he said. “You’re going to see fewer STEM majors at graduation. You’re going to see lower GPA or massive grade inflation. And generally, you’re going to see a significant decrease in the quality of undergraduate education at the University of California by the early 2030s.”

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